SURVIVORS

         Ebi Gruenblatt was born in Nyirmihalydi, Hungary in May 1, 1927 to Morris and Margit Gruenblatt who also had three other boys.  The family was widely know and well-respected.      When Germans occupied Hungary in March of 1944, Ebi was just before seventeen years old when the Nazi’s arrested her and her family along with all of the other Jews in the area and kept them in a synagogue without food or water for two weeks.  At that time they were herded to a closed off ghetto where they were in danger of starving to death.  Luckily, some Christian friends, smuggled them food and water.  After five days on a crowded train, they finally arrived in Auschwitz.  At the Plaszow labor camp near Cracow, Ebi and her mother passed as sisters in June.  Their job was moving heavy rocks from one location to another.  They were moved back to Auschwitz in late September of 1944.  Then, they were sent to Augsburg, Germany, to work in the K.U.K.A. Ammunition Factory where the area was heavily bombed by the Allies and soon evacuated to Dachau first and later then to a work camp near Muehldorf.  Ebi was given a job as a registrar because she knew German.  Again, Ebi, her mother, and others were packed into cattle cars when the Allies began bombing Muehldorf at the end of April 1945.  The German’s plan was to kill them in the Appellation Mountains; however, the train tracks were almost completely destroyed so they couldn’t get through.  A little while later, Allied planes began to attack the train; so, the prisoners took shelter under the boxcars.  Ebi and her mother almost escaped but the Germans hunted them down and brought them back to the train.  Fortunately, Allied soldiers arrived on the scene to liberate the prisoners—Ebi was a free human being on her eighteenth birthday.

Ebi Gruenblatt